Coons Patch Mesh Gradients in Inkscape

A Work in Progress — Last updated 29 September 2011

You can now create and edit meshes (warning, code is unstable).
The code is available: bzr source. You will need
Cairo trunk.

The Experiment

I've patched my copy of Inkscape trunk to support Mesh Gradients.
It was relatively straight forward as all the hard work has been
done for me by Cairo (trunk now contains Mesh Gradient
support).[Thanks to Krzysztof Kosiński for giving me hints on
where to begin!] My modifications are by no means generally
usable. They contain little error checking and they will have to be
rewritten if on-screen editing of meshes can be
added. Never-the-less, it serves as a test bed for the proposed
structure of a <meshGradient> specification.
See: Coons Patch Mesh Gradients in
SVG for more details.

Basic Gradient Types

Inkscape displaying examples of the old, rather boring,
linear and radial gradients, as well as the exciting new
Mesh Gradient (single patch). The gradients have been
applied to <rect>s shown with red strokes.

Conical Gradients

Mesh Patch Array

This example of a 6x6 patch Mesh Gradient was done to investigate
the speed of rendering. It appears that rendering speed isn't a
problem. Note, that Inkscape trunk with its Cairo based renderer
is vastly faster than the current release (0.48). Also, I used a
recent Sandy Bridge laptop.